Topic: Scientists creates super wood. Can be used for super soundboard ?

Scientists managed to chemically treated and compress wood to the point of create a super wood, strong as steel or more.

https://hoaxlie.com/scientists-invent-s...ace-steel/
https://umdrightnow.umd.edu/news/umd-re...ost-metals

Could it be used for create a super soundboard for piano, since the wood would be more denser ?
If they could find out the best concentration (compression) to turn the wood mure musical.

O maybe it could just make medium quality spruce get the quality of the best spruces or even like glacial age spruce. Just this would be a great goal for wood musical instruments, since the best quality spruce is available just for a minoroty of piano brands.

Just wondering...

Last edited by Beto-Music (21-02-2018 04:28)

Re: Scientists creates super wood. Can be used for super soundboard ?

Maybe this is the type of wood that is being planned for the 70 story wooden building in Japan    ;p)

Lanny

Re: Scientists creates super wood. Can be used for super soundboard ?

We were talking about this over on a guitar forum... interesting. Tones will be different than regular wood because of density of course.

Pianoteq 7, all the pianos , a  Casio:  Px-560M, PX 3000, (2) PX350's, Mac i27 and MacBook Pro, Focusrite, Scarlette 18/20 and a bunch of speakers and headphones

Re: Scientists creates super wood. Can be used for super soundboard ?

That looks very promising for the domain that concern us musicians :
"The researchers say that the treatment can be applied to bulk amounts of wood at once, and allows them to bend and mold the material into the desired shape at the start."
One can imagine a press that would mould the soundboard of a piano or the body of a guitar.
But how will that behave over time ?

Re: Scientists creates super wood. Can be used for super soundboard ?

In the past, piano manufacturers have researched soundboards made of aluminum, masonite, polycarbonate (plastic), and other woods besides spruce.  In the end, spruce continues to be the material of choice in the world's manufacture of pianos, probably for its combination of flexibility & compliance along with stiffness and structural rigidity.  I think it's fine that other materials are investigated for use in piano soundboards; may the best material win. 

Of course anything is possible, but I don't foresee a paradigm shift away from the current type of natural wood used in quality piano soundboards.  Until then, spruce shall rein for the foreseeable future.

Cheers,

Joe

Re: Scientists creates super wood. Can be used for super soundboard ?

I thought almost the same thing as you,
But for music I imagine they cold develop a intermediary process, not aiming to a such rigid strong like steel kind of wood, but targeting to be able to process common wood to turn it similar to the best woods for music.

For example, here on Brazil our spruce it's not good like the spruce from Europe's cold florests, since the veins of the wood do not grown so close when the tree it's in tropical or subtropical regions. And the actual spruce in europeen florest are not so great as europeen florest spruce that growned during ice age.
I bet China's piano factories will research if it's possible to use this technology somehow to make the chinese spruce closer in quality to europeen spruce.

And about ecologic terms, not music, If this technology could be used to chemically treat and compress bamboo fibers making very good wood, in a affordable costs, it would save millions of trees. Bamboo produces more kg of wood per square meter of soil than most tree camps, and grows very much faster.
Bamboo it's very strong, even with the usual production methods of gluing bamboo pieces and pressing. Who have a bamboo cutting board knows how resistant it is.

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jcfelice88keys wrote:

In the past, piano manufacturers have researched soundboards made of aluminum, masonite, polycarbonate (plastic), and other woods besides spruce.  In the end, spruce continues to be the material of choice in the world's manufacture of pianos, probably for its combination of flexibility & compliance along with stiffness and structural rigidity.  I think it's fine that other materials are investigated for use in piano soundboards; may the best material win. 

Of course anything is possible, but I don't foresee a paradigm shift away from the current type of natural wood used in quality piano soundboards.  Until then, spruce shall rein for the foreseeable future.

Cheers,

Joe


Impressive challenge.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02...-building/

LTECpiano wrote:

Maybe this is the type of wood that is being planned for the 70 story wooden building in Japan    ;p)

Lanny

Last edited by Beto-Music (21-02-2018 18:16)